Female Friendship: Debut Novels by Rufi Thorpe and Emily Gould

Female friendships are not commonly found at the center of the literary novel. Mrs. Dalloway might be considered the masterpiece of this category, with the relationship between Clarissa Dalloway and her poignant memories and deep affections for her old, spirited friend Sally Seton. Leaping forward about seventy years, Lorrie Moore’s coming-of-age novel Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? has evolved into a contemporary classic, an elegy of sorts that recounts a long-ago friendship between two teenage girls who reside and work in a small town in upstate New York. And more recently, the autobiographical, genre-bending How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti examines the ongoing questions of identity, artistic ambition, and adulthood within the context of a tight-knit group of Canadian friends in Toronto.

In many “female friendship” novels, common themes encompass the life-defining events of pregnancy, abortion, and birth—either the actual experience or the want or loss defined by its absence. For example, the narrative of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? pitches forward when Sils becomes pregnant by her boyfriend and Berie, the first-person narrator, steals money from her cash register at the amusement park, where they both work in order to pay for her best friend’s procedure. At the same time, the beautiful, economical narrative is framed by the older Berie, well into middle age, childless, and in a loveless marriage, making for a perfect-pitch juxtaposition of losses of youth and adulthood.

This summer welcomes debut novels by two young, talented writers that place female friendships front and center in their narratives—The Girls from Corona del Mar by Rufi Thorpe and Friendship by Emily Gould. The coming-of-age novels both focus on two young women on the cusp of life, reckless and seemingly carefree, yet hurtling into the elusive unknowns of womanhood, who, within due time, somehow align into sturdier versions of their former selves. The similarities end there, as these two novels diverge significantly in style, scope, and narrative distance.

With the first-person The Girls from Corona del Mar, Thorpe tells the story of Mia, who grows up in the small suburban town in Southern California with her alcoholic mother, two half brothers (frequently under her charge), and an indifferent stepfather. On the novel’s first page, Thorpe writes: “In the narrow cove of our nineties California neighborhood, there was no girl more perfect than Lorrie Ann Swift, not so much because she was extraordinary, but because she was ordinary in a way that surpassed us. . . . Most of our parents had wound up in the sleepy ocean hamlet of Corona del Mar through a series of increasingly devastating mistakes.” Given Mia’s family’s unhappy circumstances, life appears a bit brighter for her best friend, Lorrie Ann. Her family attends church every Sunday. They rent movies on Friday nights and watch them together. Her mother is a preschool teacher with a large collection of ceramic gnomes; her father is a pseudo-successful musician, complete with a dramatic gold loop in one ear. Right away, Mia manufactures a personal identity of negative space in contrast to her friend’s seemingly moral demeanor. “In a way, Lorrie Ann made me everything I am, for my personality took shape as an equal and opposite reaction to who she was, just as, I am sure, her personality formed as a result of mine,” Mia explains. “People do that kind of thing. They divvy up qualities, as though reality, in order to be manageable at all, should be sorted, labeled, pinned down. . . . For me, my friend Lorrie Ann was the good one, and I was the bad one.”

The first pregnancy and subsequent abortion appears within the first chapter, and Thorpe rarely trains away from this loaded theme of choice and procreation, exploring the issue from multiple experiences and perspectives: Right after graduation, Lorrie Ann becomes pregnant after being accepted to Berkeley...